Dinner with Wong Kar-Wai
Sam Rasnake

Our lives are measured out
on slender threads, impossible
to ignore—in the back alleys,
in front rooms—obsessing all
the numbed routines that tell us
who we are, tell us there must be
some change—We walk, we eat—
a slow pace against thick speed:

Chef salads with Cantonese opera
on late-night television—black coffee
or whiskey, roast pork and rice—
lychees, pineapple, sardines—

The escalator ride gives way
to a steaming bowl of noodles
while the city smears and jerks
closer to an edge of millennium,
closer to the clockwork of when
it’s gone, it’s gone for good

I go West, you stay put—
each of us full of his own
fierce design for the beautiful,
for the simple made perfect,
for the sky, dark and open

Return to Archive